Climbing out of Alliance, a crossroads between nowhere and nothing in sight, Peter stopped to eat a sandwich at the Niobrara River crossing. He crouched on a cement pad at the bridge's western anchor, staring out over the river chasm toward a green silage ocean to the north. At his feet a brass rectangle embossed with the letters WPA set forth the legend of a public construction project completed in November of nineteen thirty one. Below, moving slowly so as not to attract the attention of waterhungry industry, the Niobrara skidded its siltyellowed way east, resisting the draw of the grand, low Missouri as it collided with each new sandstone wall, each tumble of cottonwood and willow.

For an hour he’d kept pace with a freighter carrying slate and pig iron, flat cars loaded with new Fords. Plastic placentas shuddering in the wind as the train seethed across the plain approaching the South Dakota foothills. Paralleling the train's path, he became engrossed in the notion that he was following a primitive industrial organism. How near was this beast to extinction? Clawing northwest on narrow steel shoulders, the locomotive was an exoskeletal remnant of a past epoch. Greasy diesel bile boiled from six engines straining to drag a creaking carcass of refined materials back to the nest—a hive of turnarounds and freight cranes somewhere in the vast west whose minimalist frames swept a cloudless sky to keep it so.

One month to the day from the close of Peter’s panel of ecclesiastical inquiry Bishop Poli called Father Doman in for a consultation.

The ecclesiastical inquiry had withered for lack of support, but in a manner not anticipated by its underwriters, its success was assured. Duty, piety, an outpouring of labor in the name of faith. Those had been Peter Doman's life, his passion.

Assailed, confronted and impugned by the orderlies of conservative Catholicism, Peter stood before a mirror of his own beliefs and was not comforted by what the reflection reported. Suffering a slight to honor and faith at the hands of court servants had forced a breach in his beliefs. What good was obedience, if it led to betrayal?

Blame. Peter sought a place to lay responsibility for this catastrophic failure of fairness. Seeing hypocrisy was one matter, and in that respect, no one could accuse Peter of naiveté. Intrigues were something he had been witness to on many occasions. Witnessed. But only as an onlooker, a dispassionate curiosity-driven bystander. Judgment free of sensation had always come easily, but today his skin smarted. Unclean. That’s how he felt. Tainted, as though his error was fundamental, his faith wrongheaded from the first. This created a crisis of the spirit.

In these days, he would waken at all hours pressed by a sense of foreboding. Quick awake in the night with the dead certainty that to shift in his bed would arouse an enemy within.

Doman--the anonymous, self effacing man--was not a priest that day. Decency and honor had gone into the cauldron of the panel, but a skeptic had been drawn from its furnace.

Peter watched the mud flow of the river far below. Oh ye of little faith, he thought. Today I am among your number.